RoboPrawf: The breakthrough that will let me attend conferences again

Today’s remote-presence robots are crude ..., amounting to little more than videoconferencing on wheels. But they can still be surprisingly nifty, as this correspondent discovered while pottering around RoboBusiness 2013, a robotics conference recently held in California, from the comfort of a desk 1,500 miles (2,500km) away, in Austin, Texas.

This was made possible using a Beam (pictured), developed by Suitable Technologies. It is a wheeled robot equipped with a camera, microphone and loudspeaker, and a screen displaying a live feed of its driver’s face. Instead of appearing to “locals” (as people at the remote location are known) as an image on a static desktop monitor, you are thus embodied in a physical object 1.57 metres tall, weighing just under 50kg and with a top speed of 1.5 metres per second. ...

Attendees at RoboBusiness reacted positively to the device, though a warm welcome was only to be expected from the sort of people that you find at a conference about robots. Conversations began and ended naturally, as they would in person, helped by the fact that you can point your Beam towards your remote interlocutor while talking, and turn away when you are finished. The only thing missing from the conference experience was the ability to sample free drinks. ...

Beams currently sell for $16,000 a pop, but the company wants to offer conference organisers the option of renting the devices to attendees at a price that would be competitive with the cost (flights, hotels, and so forth) of attending an event in person.

Today’s remote-presence robots are crude ..., amounting to little more than videoconferencing on wheels. But they can still be surprisingly nifty, as this correspondent discovered while pottering around RoboBusiness 2013, a robotics conference recently held in California, from the comfort of a desk 1,500 miles (2,500km) away, in Austin, Texas.

This was made possible using a Beam (pictured), developed by Suitable Technologies. It is a wheeled robot equipped with a camera, microphone and loudspeaker, and a screen displaying a live feed of its driver’s face. Instead of appearing to “locals” (as people at the remote location are known) as an image on a static desktop monitor, you are thus embodied in a physical object 1.57 metres tall, weighing just under 50kg and with a top speed of 1.5 metres per second. ...

Attendees at RoboBusiness reacted positively to the device, though a warm welcome was only to be expected from the sort of people that you find at a conference about robots. Conversations began and ended naturally, as they would in person, helped by the fact that you can point your Beam towards your remote interlocutor while talking, and turn away when you are finished. The only thing missing from the conference experience was the ability to sample free drinks. ...

Beams currently sell for $16,000 a pop, but the company wants to offer conference organisers the option of renting the devices to attendees at a price that would be competitive with the cost (flights, hotels, and so forth) of attending an event in person.